In a little corner of the web some of us are discussing what we mean when we say "web."

Some random ideas that I've been jotting down to share here in Daveverse, my home on WordPress and Mastodon. 

There is actually much to discuss because we don't have any basic agreement on this. 

I am a hard-liner. I won't use the term "web" loosely. If someone challenges me on something and says "Dave, that is not the web," I will listen to their reasoning.

I started a this.how doc on it, and plan to add more to it over time. 

First observation, we would have had no trouble defining the web prior to the explosion of social media starting in the mid-00s. It was defined by HTML and formats that fit into the same slot, ie docs that are in XML or JSON, and accessed over HTTP.

The web is about free movement. If there are walls that keep competitors out and users in, it is not the web. 

If your app lets users write for publication and can be read in a web browser, then you must at least pass through the ability to hyperlink. In other words, if you lock other people's ideas out of your users' writing space, then it's not the web. 

We're looking for a simple definition of what a web document is. That's why I wrote the textcasting doc, to say what that is, based on my experience writing on the web. That understanding came from TBL's web, which came from what people considered a text document on the PC and the Mac and before that Unix, and before that typewriters and typeface. 

Then we get to Twitter and all that is gone. 140-char limit of text without style or links that can't be edited.

Text should be at least as well specified as MP3 is the standard way to transport audio on the web.

If you're running on the social web you should support inbound and outbound RSS feeds as the simplest API. 

Both RSS and WordPress are textcasting-enabled. Makes it possible to make a nice little network of fully empowered writers.